Fleet professionals have been refining operational discipline for decades. Scheduling, maintenance cycles, driver management, compliance, fuel optimization. These are mature disciplines, built by people who understand that even small inefficiencies compound fast across thousands of vehicles and millions of miles.

What has changed, and what continues to change faster than most organizations can absorb, is the volume and variety of data that modern vehicles produce. Continuous telemetry, diagnostics, location signals, driver behavior patterns, predictive maintenance indicators. OEMs see revenue opportunity in licensing that data. Fleet operators see the potential to make faster, better-informed decisions from acquisition through remarketing. Technology companies see a massive and increasingly crowded market. Everyone agrees the data matters. The harder question is what to do with it.

Most fleet organizations today can pull from more data sources than they can meaningfully process. Telematics platforms have matured. OEM-embedded connectivity is standard on most new vehicles. Third-party integrations and cloud platforms have multiplied the available inputs. Access isn’t the constraint anymore. Architecture is. Too many organizations are still running parallel data streams that don’t communicate. The telematics platform captures one set of signals, the maintenance management system captures another, fuel card data lives somewhere else, and driver behavior scoring comes from yet another vendor. Each tool works well enough in isolation, but the composite picture stays fragmented. And fragmented data produces fragmented strategy, which is how fleet organizations end up making major capital decisions based on incomplete information.

Connected vehicle intelligence moves past basic telematics by integrating operational, financial, and predictive data to answer harder questions. Which vehicles are underperforming relative to total cost of ownership? Which drivers are creating outsized risk? Are maintenance schedules optimized for how the fleet actually runs, or just following OEM defaults? Answering those questions requires more than a dashboard.

Automakers have invested heavily in connectivity infrastructure, and the best OEM fleet data programs now deliver real value through diagnostics, remote vehicle health, OTA update management, and integration APIs. Rob Minton, who spent a decade at Geotab negotiating data licensing agreements with major global OEMs before joining AMA, has watched the willingness to share data grow dramatically. The appetite is there. The structures, though, vary widely, and many fleet operators don’t fully understand what they’re entitled to under current contracts.

Where many OEMs still have room to grow is on the prescriptive side. Fleet customers want analytics that help them act, not just dashboards that show them what already happened. They want partners who can interpret data within the context of a specific operating environment, not hand over a raw feed and leave interpretation to a team that’s already stretched thin.

The organizational picture is shifting too. For decades, fleet was managed as a cost center: keep vehicles running, keep costs predictable, replace assets on a regular cycle. That model worked when vehicles were simpler and the available data was limited. Now, when a fleet manager can see real-time utilization across every asset, the question shifts from “when is this vehicle scheduled for replacement?” to “is this vehicle earning its place?” More fleet organizations are creating dedicated data and analytics roles. More fleet directors report to C-suite leadership rather than routing through procurement. These are structural signals that the industry is starting to treat fleet data with the same strategic weight as customer data or supply chain data.

On the technology side, consolidation continues. Larger platforms are acquiring point solutions to build broader offerings. Smaller providers are differentiating through vertical specialization in government fleets, last-mile delivery, construction, or EV fleet management. For fleet operators evaluating partners, the meaningful differentiators have moved well past tracking capability. What matters now is interoperability, flexibility in reporting, and whether a provider will actually invest in understanding the business. For technology companies trying to grow, the path to fleet customers increasingly runs through OEM relationships, since automakers control access to embedded vehicle data. Providers with strong OEM partnerships can offer a fundamentally richer product than those relying on aftermarket hardware alone.

NAFA I&E 2026 in Cleveland this week brings together over 2,100 fleet professionals, 230+ exhibitors, and more than 60 educational sessions. The Conference of Automotive Remarketing is co-locating with NAFA this year, which adds a vehicle lifecycle perspective connecting fleet management to the remarketing side. That kind of end-to-end view is rare at a single event.

The AMA team will be at Booth #692 throughout the show. The conversations that tend to matter most at NAFA happen between sessions, on the expo floor, and over dinners, where fleet directors share what’s actually working, OEM fleet managers preview what’s coming, and technology companies test their positioning against people who’ve heard every pitch in the book.

If you’re attending and want to talk about fleet data strategy, OEM advisory, or connected vehicle programs, visit us at Booth #692 or reach out through automobilityadvisors.com.